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Thursday, March 28, 2013

Telephone Phobia

That’s the fear of talking on the telephone. I Googled it just now, and was deeply
disappointed that it does not have a cooler name. Phobialist.com has it indexed as “telephonophobia,” but
that’s not much better and sounds made-up to boot. “Albuminurophobia,”
for example, is the fear of kidney disease. That one sounds cool, but is anyone not afraid
of kidney disease? I feel like
that’s a really reasonable thing to be afraid of. But I digress, as I often do.

I
looked up “fear of talking on the phone,” because I’m pretty sure I have
it.Among what are probably a
couple other flavors of social anxiety, making phone calls causes me an
inordinate amount of distress.Not
when it’s my friends or my family (okay, sometimes when it’s my mom, but that’s
different (just kidding Mom I love you (sorry for all the parentheses (I’m a
computer science major)))), but when a situation requires me to pick up the
phone and make contact with someone I don’t know, an icy dread runs down my
spine and my fingers will literally shake as I’m dialing.

My
anxiety was brought into sharp focus today at work.One of the things we do for musicians is help them put out a
mobile app through Apple, but something went wrong and we got locked out of one
of our iTunes accounts.This is
when a normal person picks up the phone and calls Apple and asks the nice
people on the other end of the line to please unlock our account.

I started frantically searching the
Internets for some way—any way—to
solve the problem without calling Apple support.It turns out that it’s a fairly common problem and lots of
people were talking about it on various forums.But all the conversations marked with a friendly green check
mark (for “problem solved” in case my blog is all you’ve seen of the web)
invariably ended with that fateful sentence (not the grammatical kind, the doom
kind):

“Called Apple support.They fixed the problem before I was off
the phone.Now there’s a beautiful
rainbow spilling through my window on dewdrops of happiness.”

I may have paraphrased a
little.My workmate found me in my
cube. He was impressed with my efforts to solve the problem, as he had not thought to Google the issue, but ultimately it didn't matter. “We’ve had this problem
before and all we’ve had to do is call up Apple and ask them to fix it," he said.

“I get nervous calling the Nissan
dealership to schedule a service appointment,” I admitted.It’s the truth.

He chuckled.

I wish there was a more dramatic
end to this story.I wish I could
tell you I overcame my fear or grew as a person in some way.I could make something up, but the
truth of the matter is simply that my workmate made the call.Maybe the lesson is that human culture isn’t survival of the fittest after
all.Sometimes the broken people
make it.

I don’t mean to belittle the afflictions
of people with serious mental disorders and social anxieties that make it
difficult for them to manage their lives from day to day. I can only tell my own stories, and
assure you guys that if you’re broken in little ways, you’re not alone.

Well that was a terrible ending. Um…How
about: Everyone’s crazy and it’s
okay! That’s good. We should make… what day is today? March 28th. We should make March 28th Everyone’s
Crazy and It’s Okay Day. It will
catch on. I can feel it.